BBC 1 1985

A Computer Originated World

Created Mo 3-Apr-06
Revised Su 4-Dec-16

A live picture of a spinning globe had been shown before BBC
programmes since the Sixties. When colour came to BBC 1, a curved
mirror was added behind the globe, and the effect this produced
continued to be seen on screen for over fifteen years. But
technology had moved on and time was running out for this mechanical
symbol.

A solid state device had generated the symbol on BBC 2 since the
end of the Seventies. Subsequently, electronic clocks on both
networks had replaced the mechanical clocks. And in early 1984,
work began on a project to generate a digital symbol for BBC 1 too.

Special thanks to BBC Research & Development and Hywel Williams for
supplying the images and much of the information used on this page.

Some of the images shown on this page contain graphics
that are copyright of the BBC.

Michael Grade joined the BBC as Controller of BBC 1 in September 1984.
When he arrived, work was already underway to develop a new globe symbol.
The initial difficulty had been to get the world to rotate one whole
revolution with the limited amount of memory chips available. But this
problem was soon solved.

Another project was also in development when Grade arrived, a soap opera
called EastEnders. The new controller knew he had to arrest the
falling ratings on his channel and decided to delay the introduction of
the new soap to co-incide with a re-launch of the programme schedule.
EastEnders would go out on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7pm. Terry Wogan
would start the evening on the other weekdays with a chat show. The
new globe was also delayed so it could form part of the new look.

Viewers would see the new globe for the first time at 7pm on
Monday, February 18th, 1985 as the announcer
welcomed them to Wogan.

The device that made the earth move came in a metal box that would have
would have been mounted in a rack together with a
similar-looking box responsible for generating the station clock. You can see
them both here.

As well as the network globe for England housed at Television Centre in
London, a player would have been required for Scotland, Northern Ireland
and Wales. Each English region would also require its own player for the
times when it opted-out of the national schedule.

There's a switch on the box, marked CEEFAX, that adds the text
"CEEFAX 888" underneath the station name on the network globe. For the
other globes it adds text to identify the nation or regional centre.

This is what a globe player looks like when you open it up.

On the left there are ten removable cards filled with PROM (Programmable
Read-Only Memory) chips containing 20 000 pixels of map data
pre-rendered as frames of animation. Each card has on its side a yellow
LED that lights up when that card is in use.

To the right of these cards are five unused slots and to the right
of those is a card with a red handle. This is the processor card, to the
right of which are four more cards containing the two images
pictured below. The player can be made to display these by changing
some switch settings on the processor card.

Now we can begin to see how the globe player works. The transparent
blue sphere representing the ocean is the background image.
The processor uses the map data to decide for each pixel whether
to leave it as the sea or overlay a pixel from the golden sphere
for the land or simply plot a black pixel to represent the
land on the other side of the world.

A test image is provided by the player which tests some of the
video mixer's abilities, including what the ocean globe looks like
when some land is overlayed onto it.

If you look closely, you will see that the golden shell is
slightly larger than the blue sphere, so that the land has the
subtle effect of floating over the top of the ocean as it
rotates.

Globe player facts

One complete revolution takes twelve seconds and each second
requires 25 frames of animation, a total of 300, stored on the
memory cards.

If you remove one of the cards, the globe will display just
the ocean when it tries to use the data on that card.

Unlike the BBC 2 symbol from six years earlier, the new globe symbol
was anti-aliased, so there were no jagged edges where the land met
the sea and where the sea and the lettering met the background.

Inside the BBC, the new globe was known as COW, an acronym for
computer-originated world.

A version of the COW was also used for BBC Video and another
was used in the opening titles of Alas Smith &
Jones (on BBC 2). For Comic Relief, a red
nose was 'attached' to the globe.

In January 2006 A COW player came up for sale on eBay. But instead of showing the BBC 1 legend,
this one displayed the logo for BBC Worldwide underneath the globe.

The COW lasted just about six years before it was replaced with
a new BBC 1 symbol, once again based on a globe.